The Hustle (27 page)

“It's just more and better, part of it is human nature. So say some guy has a ten-foot long jump, well, people are going to try and jump ten feet and one inch. And so if you have the school and it's competitive, people are gonna figure out better ways to get in and how to be more competitive, and the same thing with college, people are trying to get in and do more and more and be more competitive. Everybody's trying to get an edge.”

There are times when Chris wants to change course—or at least slow down a bit—though it doesn't seem possible. “I feel out of alignment, I feel unbalanced, I feel like my outlook on life isn't simple, I feel like it's complicated. I don't even feel all that disciplined,” he says. “Look, it's all part of growing and existing. Who's ever done this work, family, have a mortgage thing right?

“Sometimes I wish you could work in a gas station and just be happy with being you and being alive. And it's not OK. I can intellectualize it all I want and know that that's an ideal but I'm pretty far from achieving that. I'm pretty affected by it.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Just the need to achieve,” he says. “In part, it's not just the family, it's the whole culture. If you're used to excelling, you either excel and you fit in, or you don't. So sometimes it doesn't feel like there's a breather.”

I tell Chris that I'm surprised, because from the outside—high school sports stardom, Princeton, good job, Mercedes in the driveway, beautiful house, loving family—he seems to be doing really well.

“That's what I'm saying,” he says. “My perception is different than that. It's hard. It's just the old saying, sometimes you need to stop and smell the roses. And if you're always looking for a bigger flower, it's … I'm not alone. I'm totally not alone. I think that's not an unusual thing, when you grow up in an environment like that. And it's not just my family, it's Lakeside and that culture.

“The higher your expectations are with everything, the tougher it is to reach them and therefore the tougher it is to be satisfied. It's one thing I want to do and it keeps shifting, it's like the better you do or the more you have, you can catch yourself just focusing on the next thing, or comparing yourself against a different set of expectations.… But if you talk about spiritual development to me it means being able to just exist right now and be happy with what's around me and not just focus on the future or the past or what didn't happen, or what I want to happen, or what I don't have. That's jail, in my opinion. And a lot of times, it's great. But it has its claws.”

Lakeside Revisited

On a Friday afternoon in September 2005, about three thousand students, parents, faculty, and alums of Lakeside School mingled under forty-eight tents set up on the school's soccer field, browsing displays put up by school organizations such as the outdoor program, the athletic department, and the gay-and-lesbian student group. White banners around campus declared in cursive maroon script,
LIVING OUR MISSION
. A band played Brazilian music. Eventually the crowd filed into a large tent set with rows of chairs to listen to short speeches by students and alums leading to the main event, a keynote address by the school's most prominent graduate, Bill Gates.

The event marked the formal launch of a campaign to raise $105 million. That day, the school announced that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation had just pledged $40 million, and an additional $30 million in donations had already been lined up. The money, the school said, was being raised for two main purposes: to increase diversity by boosting the amount of financial aid available to students, and to expand the Global Service Learning Program, which would send students to places such as Peru and India to do volunteer work.

Speaking from behind a podium, Headmaster Bernie Noe announced, “This evening we say to the families of the Greater Seattle area that if you have a son or a daughter who is qualified and motivated to do the work at Lakeside School, then we want your child to apply. We will make available financial assistance so that any child can attend the school.”

Gates, dressed in a dark gray blazer and blue shirt, capped the afternoon with some reminiscences about his school days. He recalled being assigned to computerize the school's class schedule and how he made sure to put the attractive girls in his classes and give himself Fridays off. He said that Lakeside was the type of place that allowed kids like him to fool around with computers in those early days instead of having teachers regulate their use, and that's how he learned to program. He was supporting the school now, he said, because he saw a “deep need for leadership in the world,” something he thought Lakeside could provide. “If there had been no Lakeside,” he said, “there would have been no Microsoft. And I'm here to say thank you.”

In the three decades since Gates had attended Lakeside, it had become one of the most prestigious private schools in the country, its success paralleling the rising fortunes of the Northwest (which in large part were driven by Gates and Microsoft). The
Wall Street Journal
has ranked Lakeside among the most successful high schools in the country at getting its students into “selective” colleges. As Lakeside's profile shot up, so did demand—the school now receives about four hundred applications for thirty-two slots in each incoming fifth-grade class. It charges more than $20,000 a year in tuition. Its endowment has grown to more than $150 million.

Just as all the individual members of our basketball team have had to adjust to changing times, Lakeside as an institution has faced the challenge of transforming or falling behind. One persistent blemish on the school's image has been the perception that it is only for rich white kids. Over the years, Lakeside has had a consistently hard time retaining black students and faculty. As recently as 1999, every faculty member at the Upper School was white. A few years later, the school commissioned a consulting firm to conduct a survey about Lakeside's perception in Seattle, and the answer came back as “rich, white, and elite.”

The fund-raising drive kicked off by Bill Gates was one of continuing efforts by the school to change its image. “I want as many students as possible, from as many different backgrounds as possible, to enjoy a Lakeside education,” Gates told the crowd that afternoon. “So I think it's important to put the financial aid program at Lakeside on such a solid footing that money will never be a reason for denying a Lakeside education to a promising student.”

The idea behind the event was quite radical. The school was stating that it was going to do everything it could to draw more students from minority and nonwealthy backgrounds, even if that meant fewer slots for its traditional constituency, the city's elite families. Instead of minority students coming to Lakeside in a haphazard way, as they did when I was a student there, the school was seeking to develop a sustainable pipeline. Minority and nonwealthy students who were qualified for Lakeside would be sought out and their tuition paid. This would negate the need for anyone to devise an integration program such as our basketball team—Lakeside would already have a diverse student body. In essence, the fund-raising drive was asking alumni families to donate to an effort that, if successful, would diminish the chances of their own offspring gaining entry to the school.

But besides the basic outline of the program—the idea that there would be many more students and teachers from minority backgrounds—the school had a hard time pinpointing what its diversity push would mean, though notes from planning meetings reflect that administrators thought the effort could turn Lakeside into a “rock star” school. In March 2004, as the diversity campaign was gearing up, the school's director of admissions, an African-American woman, wrote an e-mail expressing her concern about comments she'd heard from white students and families who thought that new minority teachers and students would “reduce the quality” of the school. “My first few years at Lakeside were hard ones,” she wrote. “I was publicly accused of being unfair, to offering too much financial aid, to being inattentive to connected and affluent families. Each of these accusations was ill-founded and inflammatory, and it is difficult to ignore my suspicion that most of these accusations would not have been made if I had been a white male. My experiences and others I've observed make me wonder why it is okay in this community for people to attack its newest, most vulnerable members with such vigor.… My fear as I sit down to write this is for the new students and adults of color who will join us next fall. Will this community have changed enough by then so that they don't have to have their abilities questioned because of their race?”

More than a year later, as Gates spoke from the podium, the diversity campaign was already hitting snags that in the coming months would get worse, attracting embarrassing attention from the national media, and eventually resulting in a lawsuit that charged the school with fostering racial discrimination.

“Diversity” started to become a buzzword at Lakeside in the mid-1980s, when private schools across the United States—led by the National Association of Independent Schools—stepped up efforts to recruit students who were not wealthy or white. “Multicultural education,” the thinking went, would not only broaden the opportunities available to minority students, but also aid traditional private school students in “developing respect for the immense complexity of humanity and gaining insights and perspectives into their own particular cultures,” the NAIS wrote in the 1980s.

In 1987, Lakeside devoted twelve pages of its quarterly magazine to diversity. In an introduction to the set of short articles—most by staff and faculty members employing yawn-inducing jargon about things such as curriculum development and statements of educational purpose—the headmaster, Dan Ayrault, wrote that the school had not made enough progress since admitting its first black students in 1965: “Given the number of advantages and resources we have inherited, we should be a model of excellence in diversity, and we are far short of that.”

Lakeside was serious in its intent to increase its diversity. In the fall of 1986—a few months after our basketball team had its run—Ayrault hired a new Middle School head who was nationally known as a leader in the diversity-in-private-schools movement. The new head began to increase the school's recruitment of minority students. At the same time, Bob Henry, an African-American teacher who had grown up in Seattle, joined the school as the Middle School's diversity coordinator. “It was a lot of work and a lot of interesting times, and not all of it easygoing and fun,” Henry says of his early years at Lakeside when I meet with him in a classroom at the Middle School, where he now teaches history.

By the early 1990s, the number of nonwhite students at the Middle School had climbed to nearly 25 percent, Henry tells me, but then things got sticky. The diversity push had an unexpected setback when Ayrault, a dynamic and respected headmaster, died of a heart attack in 1990. Other hurdles were perhaps more easily foreseen, such as the zero-sum game of private school admissions. “With every diversity admit, there was a traditional nonadmit, and I think that had an impact,” Henry says. “I don't know if it was ever said, ‘Hey look, you gotta get off of that case because our kids are not getting in,' but something was made known. And obviously the school has to earn its living, therefore you can't close your doors on the families that have supported the school traditionally.”

The other problem that came with higher minority enrollment, Henry tells me, was a perceived shift in the school's culture. Parents began to grumble that the “diversity admits” were diminishing Lakeside's academic quality. In addition, some parents complained that a few of the African-American boys were starting fights and messing around in class. Henry says that a lot seemed to come down to the “subtle” ways people see race: Some of the black kids were aggressive, he says, but there were also aggressive white kids—that comes with adolescence. “What complicates it or exacerbates it is the color line, because the color line is a trigger for all kinds of emotions and all kinds of primal responses,” Henry says. “If it's black kids bullying, then it becomes a different thing, oddly. Everything becomes different when the color factor plays in.”

By 1993, the Middle School head who had been hired to increase diversity had left. Support for the diversity program had not only evaporated, Henry says, but also many of the newly enrolled black students dropped out once they got to the Upper School. Henry, a trim, thoughtful man who picks his words carefully, was chastened.

He tells me that he had viewed diversity through the lens of his own experiences in the 1960s, when his had been one of the first African-American families to move out of the Central Area to the South End. He integrated a white public middle school and found that, because he felt he was representing all blacks, he forced himself to become a “stellar student.” When he came to Lakeside as diversity director, Henry looked for potential students who were not only solid academically, but who also could handle the “stress” of being one of the only blacks in a white institution. In other words, Henry says, he was looking for young versions of Jackie Robinson. “Of course, we're talking about kids. That's the difference,” he says. “Jackie Robinson can make the decision on his own and stick to it.”

Henry also began to question some of what he was doing. In the early 1990s, stories began to appear in the media touting the idea that “black men are an endangered species,” Henry tells me. He thought that black male students at the school should have a forum to discuss issues like that, so he started Lakeside's first affinity group, the African American Brotherhood. Now, Henry, who tells me he has been influenced by the writings of black conservative Shelby Steele, wonders if affinity-based groups—Lakeside also has groups for Asian and gay students—do more harm than good. “It's institutionalizing seeing yourself and being yourself as a racial person—as a racial identity, a sexual identity, whatever,” he says. “I think that's limiting, and potentially closes one to the opportunities to experience the broader world. To really be educated is to see all those possibilities of who you are because you are so many things.”

Henry left the diversity job and switched to teaching full time. “I think I did a couple good things in the role and raised some good questions, but it was draining, emotional work,” he tells me. “To some extent it's what one should do and can do wherever they are, but to another extent, as Malcolm X says, you're in the belly of the beast, so you better take care of what you're doing and what you're saying and where you're saying it. That was a strain, so I chose to be a schoolteacher and have my impact in the day-to-day back-and-forth with kids.”

Lakeside's diversity tide ebbed until 1999, when Bernie Noe came on as the new headmaster. If the board of trustees wanted a forceful leader, it got one in Noe, who came to the school from the prestigious Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C.—the alma mater of Chelsea Clinton and current school of Malia and Sasha Obama—where he had been the Upper School principal.

Noe is a short, energetic man about fifty years old. He still has a somewhat boyish look—his hair, though now silver, is parted in the middle and falls down across his forehead. His tan sports jacket and tightly knotted tie add to the preppy look. From his office windows, which offer a view over the Lakeside quad, you can see students trundling between classes with backpacks slung over one shoulder. Inside, large, framed posters of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. hang on the walls. When he speaks, Noe, who has spent his career educating the children of the rich and powerful, emanates an unwavering belief in his ideas.

From the moment he arrived at Lakeside in 1999, Noe proceeded as if his intention was to raise Lakeside to the level where its national reputation would be on a par with his former employer. He started by shaking up the old guard. Noe instituted a formal faculty review process, which the school had not had before (the classrooms had been basically the fiefdoms of individual teachers). Several teachers who had been at the school for years either left or were told that their services were no longer needed.

In 2003, Noe shifted the focus to where the school was going in the next decade. “We held a retreat,” Noe tells me. “All the faculty, the board of trustees, the parents' association, the alumni association, representatives from the staff, representatives from the student body, and we looked at the mission statement and said, ‘What do we need to do here? What will these kids need to know graduating into this new world?' The two conclusions were: We need to be a more diverse community—at the adult and student level we need to be better at doing diversity. And we need to be teaching the kids about a global world.”